For several months I have been telling friends, colleagues and everyone who will listen to me that there is no way Donald Trump, a ridiculous bigot with a face like a Christmas ham, could ever secure the nomination for president of one of the two major American political parties. It has pained me considerably to discover that I was wrong.

Republicans have a number of bad ideas, I said (on and on – and on – I went), but they couldn’t possibly take seriously a figure as fundamentally unserious as Trump, who barely advertised at all and simply relied on a tidal wave of bemused, then disturbed, then horrified media coverage to promote what appeared to be a complete joke of a presidential campaign without the least hint of a workable idea on anything.

Donald Trump tore up the rulebook of American politics – and is winning | Jonathan Freedland

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What will Trump do about illegal immigrants? He’ll build a wall. How will he pay for the wall? He’ll make Mexico pay for it. How will he deal with the Affordable Care Act? He’ll repeal it, personally, somehow. What will he replace it with? “Something terrific.” (That’s a direct quote.)

It feels like we’re all on a canceled television show given a few more episodes to wrap things up: all the good writers have found work elsewhere, leaving the hacks to produce the stupidest possible version of the political process, with guest stars from eight seasons ago (Clinton, and Jeb Bush), absurd, two-dimensional villains (Ted Cruz) and utterly implausible caricatures of reality TV-star self-regard and incompetence in Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Trump’s cartoonishly awful, unworkable positions (ban Muslims!) are so obviously the obnoxious posturing of a guy who has no intention of doing anything at all that it feels insane to learn that people have been taken in by it. What is there to be taken in by? In a lot of ways, if the last few months had turned out to be a cruel, demented gag at my personal expense, that would be much preferable to the reality.

Trump’s campaign has been xenophobic and hateful on a surprisingly effective and fundamental level, which is why he is a better crooked entertainer than a crooked businessman. At base, he is more like one of his supporters than most politicians are, especially in his relationship to what people often call “dog-whistle racism”. Trump is unique in his ability to not merely sound the dog-whistle but to hear it himself; to modulate its tone and tune so that it plays a more complicated version that is unusually available to anyone who wants to listen. If you hate someone beyond reason, you will find that Donald Trump is playing your song.

And thus the tragedy of Trump is that he actually is not a power-mad dictator hellbent on the acquisition of authority to dominate the downtrodden and the different to suit his own cruel vision of the world. He has no vision or imagination, no master plan. The reason he seems to be making up policy as he goes along is because that’s what he’s doing; he’s simply telling gleefully ill-informed people like himself what they want to hear.

Trump has been the dirty mirror of the American mind for decades; his whole enterprise on NBC built up to the act of telling people more famous, wealthy and attractive than the viewer that they’re fired, and if he looked like a goblin while doing it, so much the better.

American life can be very hard, and hardship often makes people angry, bitter and eager for conflict. George Orwell observed in his review of Mein Kampf that the book’s appeal was in its pandering to that eagerness. “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense,” he wrote, “they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”

Now, after a recession that permanently altered the economy, unthinkable levels of drug addiction and horrifying increases in clinical depression so severe they led to a suicide epidemic, there is an enormous faction in American politics willing to blame someone – anyone – for how awful and unfair their lives have become, and to attack those people, whoever they are. And that faction thinks Trump ought to be president.

Perhaps his supporters, in the absence of a true fascist who hates the particular people they hate enough to hurt them, do not worship Trump or think he understands how to legislate or govern.